Be careful with your personal data...

[f0dder]

...or this could happen to you: http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/

In some way, I think the blog is fun. But it'll be more fun when the blogger faces legal action. People just don't have any decency these days.

[Carol Haynes]

Hmm ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5030814.stm

[jgpaiva]

Oh well...
If it's true that he did sell the laptop online, i think it's fair he got that "public display". And he should respond in court for selling broken stuff.
If not.. poor guy 

[app103]

Something about all this just doesn't sit right in the pit of my stomach...my 'spidey sense' is screaming 'hoax'.

But there is two elements of truth to all of this:

1. When it comes to ebay, buyer beware...and seller beware too. (I don't trust ebay, never did and never will)

2. When selling or disposing of anything that may contain a hard drive, remove and keep the hard drive. Even wiping it is no guarantee that the data can't be recovered. It's better to be safe than sorry.

[jgpaiva]

2. When selling or disposing of anything that may contain a hard drive, remove and keep the hard drive. Even wiping it is no guarantee that the data can't be recovered. It's better to be safe than sorry.

Yes, that's a very good point, i'd never thought about that! 

[f0dder]

If it's true that he did sell the laptop online, i think it's fair he got that "public display".

I don't really think so. First, you have to consider the option that it got broken in transport. But even if he did sell a broken laptop etc. as the buyer claims, I think the buyer should have tried a bit harder with legal means. We don't live in the wild, wild west...

Even wiping it is no guarantee that the data can't be recovered.

If you do a proper full-disk wipe, ths disk won't be recoverable. Sure, the NSA "might be able to read magnetic residue data", but if that stops you from selling a drive, I'd recommend some anti-paranoia treatment ^_^.

It's true that file-based wiping shouldn't be trusted for that kind of stuff, though - especially of linux systems with file-data journalling filesystems (as opposed to NTFS and other systems which only journals file metadata).